The Price Of Success For Blacks In Brazil – Career Ascension Is Not A Shield Against Racism

AFRICANGLOBE – The unfortunate episode of the freak case of racism committed against Brazilian journalist and television personality Maria Júlia Coutinho (aka Maju) should be seen in its exact dimension. The prominence of Black men and women bothers people. The communicator Maria Júlia became a television fever. She earned great success in a gray area of ​​the news – pardon the double meaning of the word – in that the sameness is the brand which is that of the weather information. Maju’s creativity, charisma and beauty caused Jornal Nacional – the main program of Brazil’s Rede Globo (Globo Network) – went on to have as an attraction the communicator who talks about the weather forecast!

Journalist Maria Júlia Coutinho

For those who know Maria Júlia since her teens like me her success would be a matter of time. This attack could be lethal if she were not the daughter of who she is. His parents, longtime friends, are educators and activists. They are those sober and steadfast activists in their positions, but proactive and focused on education, like teachers that are. So she’s always known, with the parents she has, the intricacies of Brazilian racism. She will easily dismiss this stupidity because she has positive self-esteem and knowledge of the causes of the attacks she suffered: her spectacular success! Not bad. Her career that has been a success since TV Cultura will continue in ascension.

They commented to me about the attacks and, I confess to you, I didn’t bother to read them. The frustrations of sick people leave me in horror. Not in a sense of escaping, but a kind of understanding that I’ve had since long ago about the functioning of racial discrimination here in our unjust country.

Thus I’m quiet on the Maria Júlia – the daughter of a couple of dear friends. However, I will take advantage of this to analyze this episode – which is not an isolated incident – in “its exact dimension”.

At first, I have a warning to my readers: This type of aggression against successful Blacks shall increase. In the mid-1990s, when I coordinated a Working Group to put on the public agenda affirmative policies for Blacks, among the various debates about the positive strategic impact that Brazil would have with those policies – a fact now confirmed by several studies – we speculated about the fact that we would still have in the future a wave of explicit racism. Yes; because Brazilian racism we’ve always had: all deny being racist and everybody knows many racist people! A true “masterpiece” of the national hypocrisy. That speculation increasingly validates itself.

However, what we speculated about 18 years ago in that Working Group precursor was about the effects of affirmative action policies in a racist country, because of the emphasis on emergence of prominent Blacks: large corporation directors, judges, politicians, professionals, deans, scientists and professionals in the world of communication, among others.

The former governor and former favelada (slum inhabitant), now Congresswoman, Benedita da Silva, paid the (very expensive) price when she governed Rio de Janeiro. Celso Pitta, when he was mayor of the largest city in South America (São Paulo), was treated by TV interviewers as if he were a marginal. Joaquim Barbosa, who has never been conservative, on the contrary, being regarded as the most influential Brazilian, touted as a likely president of the republic requested retirement when he had a good time to stay in the Supreme Court – where every lawyer dreams to be and remain…When the Chief Justice suffered explicit aggression; including in public ceremonies, such as in the Câmara dos Deputados (House of Representatives).

Chief Justice of the Supreme Court

Black men and women who stand out, in any context, run a risk in Brazil. Our mistakes and possible failures count against us Blacks – yes. But they count less than our success. The latter tends to cause more damage to us than the first. So the attacks on our Maju don’t represent for me something unusual. Lamentable – always -; but predictable for those who work to decipher the “Brazil of flesh and blood.”

I am not a Cassandra who believes that everything will always get worse. I believe in a future where measures such as those provided by Law 10.639/2003 could cause the Brazilian ethnic and racial diversity to be used as an asset; a strategic value envied by other nations.

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